Advancements in technology over the last several decades have made communication easier and cheaper than ever before in human history. On the one end, e-mail, SMS and instant messaging systems have made one-to-one communication very easy and convenient. On the other end, social networking systems have made communication with larger groups of interested parties easier. However, a vast majority of human interactions happen in small social circles (e.g., in groups ranging from three to the teens). Technology has not been very effective at making small social circles of communication easier and simpler.
Current solutions lack the ability to allow people to conceptualize the circles the people are a part of approximately the same. For example, Alice may consider her circle of college friends to include Bob, Charles and herself, while Bob may think of the same set of friends (e.g., forming a real-world context/circle) as consisting of Alice, Bob himself, Charles and Danielle. Alice may not expressly disapprove of or dislike Danielle, but may simply not consider Danielle to be a part of Alice's conception of the core of Alice's college friend circle. Instead, Alice may consider Danielle just a person on the fringe of Alice's college friend circle. Charles and Danielle may also have slightly differing notions of the same circle of college friends.
Communication products that have tried to help users model and use their circles fall into three basic categories. A first category corresponds to products that ignore the notion of the group, and instead make the user enter the identities of every individual person the user considers to be part of the circle whenever the user attempts to message the circle. A second category corresponds with products that provide stored list functionality that the user may use to create lists of friends. A third category groups products that have a static, global list of members who receive the messages sent to the group. The membership of the group may be decided by several means, including single person administration, group consensus, invitations, free-for-all where anybody can join, as well as other mechanisms that rapidly cause overextension and confusion.
The first category falls short because of the high tedium of entering multiple identifiers whenever a message needs to be sent to a circle. In spite of the rather debilitating defect of the first category, the method of the first category is likely the most used of the three categories noted above.
The second category falls short for at least a couple of reasons. First, the utility of making a list is not apparent while making the list, but becomes apparent when the user sends a message to the addressees contained on the list. Second, the lists are personal to the user and are not shared with anyone else. Hence, each user has to create potentially the same or very similar lists, which few people do because of the inconvenience.
The third category also falls short for at least a couple of reasons. For example, consider the static, globally consistent nature of a group's membership (within or outside the group), where the members of the group membership see the group membership the same way. The members seeing the group membership the same way introduces complications when adding a potential new member to the group. If the potential new candidate is considered to be a core part of the group by everyone else in the group, there may be no issue. However, more often than not, the likely scenario is that some people in the group may consider the potential new candidate to be a core part of the group, while other people in the group may not. If the decision is made to include the potential new candidate as a part of the group, those current members less amenable to the new addition may be less comfortable with the addition and may view the value of the group as being diluted. When enough potential new candidates are added to the group, the group's overall utility reduces down to the point of not being very useful to anyone in the group.
If, on the other hand, the potential new candidate is not included in the group because some members do not consider the potential new candidate to be a core part of the group, the utility of the group also decreases for those members who do consider the potential new candidate to be a core part of the group. When enough of these potential new candidates are excluded from the group, the utility of the group reduces down to the point of the group not being very useful to anyone in the group. Thus, Alice may find the group to be less appealing if the group includes Danielle, whereas Bob may find the group less appealing if the group did not include Danielle. As such, any group model with a single global view of the group membership may suffer from this shortcoming.